“We want to bring them into what we love”: Exploring Desire in Teacher Education

Document Type

Presentation Abstract

Presentation Date

10-9-2017

Abstract

What is it we love about teaching and learning? Are teacher candidates expected to share that love? Such questions were on my mind as I observed a master Montessori teacher instructing teacher candidates on how to teach pre-algebra. The candidates were transfixed as the instructor systematically arranged beads on a board and then transformed the beautiful design into a tool for discovering variables and polynomial expression. The candidates remarked how typically dry math became more appealing, more enticing. The instructor explained that teaching math or any discipline required bringing children into what the teacher loved about it and piquing their desire to learn more. The preparation exercise, it appeared, was designed with the same intention. As I discuss in this talk, whether intended or not, all teacher preparation activity can be seen as reflecting particular educational desires and orienting candidates to those desires. To explore this claim, I first establish the compatibility of a liturgical framing of desire with Vygotskian sociocultural theory; I then present findings from an in-depth qualitative examination of two teacher preparation programs, one for Montessori teachers and the other for teachers planning to serve in urban, Title I schools. In an educational climate preoccupied with talk of meeting needs, building skills, and producing outcomes, questions of eros, or passionate desire, may seem superfluous; nice to consider, perhaps, but unlikely to address the difficult realities faced by K-12 teachers. Yet, as I argue, failing to directly engage eros may insidiously conscript teachers and those who prepare them in perpetuating those realities and task them with fulfilling educational desires they don’t always share.

Additional Details

Monday, October 9, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. in Math 103
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in Math Lounge 109

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS